Wednesday, 31 October 2012

Refuting
rationality or narrative, Adam Pendleton incorporates cultural artefacts that
he quotes and reconfigures within his work. This is a strategy he calls ‘Black
Dada’ which is taken from Amiri Barak’s poem 1964 poem ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’.
In the gallery, natural light picks out letters, diagonals and patterns
silkscreened in glossier ink laid over matt black on canvas. Two letters ‘A’ sit at 90 degrees to each
other, separated by the thrust of a diagonal stripe, which cuts the image into
opposing trianglar shapes with cropped ends. In the ‘Black Dada’ paintings he
refers to Sol LeWitt’s Open Cube sculptures so that the pictures adopt graphic
fragments from pre-existing cultural systems.

In
another series, ‘System of Display, Pendleton silkscreens photographs of Pablo
Picasso’s ‘primitive’ paintings exhibited at Documenta onto plexiglass and
mirror. Form, context and source are translated across time and medium into
new, self-sufficient objects. In a separate work, ‘Black Dada’ disconnected
lines of text, some appropriated and some written by Pendleton, flow like a
stream of consciousness across the creased and smudged support. Letters taken
from the phrase ‘Black Dada’, a newspaper image of an unidentified man and
blocks of geometric ink randomly float across the sequence of words referring
to Sol LeWitt, art history and sexual desire.

Arguably
the most convincing work ,‘Larry Hinton (white)’, comprises three panels that
reproduce an old promotional photograph of an actor whose agent’s and
photographer’s details are stamped in the corner, connecting it to a
pre-existing functionality. The performer’s face is hung on the wall but two
adjoining planks of irregular size sit stranded on the floor. Combining
familiar elements of a billboard, casting headshot and publicity still, Larry’s
pose is both cocky and debonair in his three piece suit, resonant of 1970s ‘Blaxploitation’
films.

Pendleton’s
concept of ‘Black Dada’ does not appear to carry much intellectual coherence
but instead employs an historic strategy of dislocation and reconfiguration. History
surges forward into his work but leaves us awash in imagery and text that feels
drained of signification beyond loose association. The work employs a tradition
of anarchic sampling, but loses discernible satirical urgency or relevance on
the way.

Within an attic
located up a steep flight of stairs, Elgreen and Dragset have made a faithful impression
of a hayloft with tools hanging along the wall such as a harness, rake and
scythe. From a distance the timber
structure of this imaginary barn spells out ‘kunst’, connecting the artifice of
a working farm to art and the imagination. This blurring of boundaries sets up
an entertaining enquiry into the realm of fantasy and expectation. On an
opposing low wall the model of a boy sits looking down to the gallery below with
his back to the tableau, while a resin vulture perches overhead. This menacing
creature is named the ‘critic’ as a well-aimed barb at the expense of the media.

A darker theme
is introduced by a miniature house placed on a rocking chair, titled ‘Home is
the Place You Left. The reassuring environment of a farm with all its
associations of nurture, fertility and abundance gradually acquires a gothic character
arising out of these parodic props. This
uncanny set first establishes reassurance, and then undermines the apparent
rural charm. Above a barn door, a stag’s antlers sprout from a head that is less
skeletal than resiliently fleshy. An empty birdbox asserts the absence of life
itself.

Continuing the
Harvest theme below on the ground floor, the artists exhibit a project that sources
layers of wall paint stripped from museums with techniques developed to
preserve frescoes. Attached to framed canvasses, these fragments have been
diligently removed from sites in Europe and the US and assume the monochromatic
insistence of Minimalist painting. Tones range from bleached white to beige and
textures vary from one ‘donor’ institution to the next. Their sizes are
inconsistent as are the distances between each work, aping natural contrasts within
public collections, and yet each banal surface of domestic paint shares formal
origins and qualities.

Elgreen and
Dragset’s hayloft introduces a nuanced psychic space of memory, discovery and
potential trauma. The series of ‘paintings’ collected from and named after
individual museums archly satirises Minimal seriality and institutional
authority but this playfulness cannot compensate for a frustrating absence of
enduring perceptual or conceptual weight.

By taking architectural floorplans from the first, published
encyclopaedia as a source for seven large scale works made of graphite and
acrylic, Guillermo Kuitca sets up an enquiry into the processes and history of
organizing knowledge. Encyclopaedias exhibit the best impulses of human
curiosity but also carry inherent doubt and contingency . Kuitca’s large and
impressive canvases appear to scatter original drawings of neo-classical
buildings into intricate fragments as if we are observing a puzzle being
re-assembled on a floor. While aspects of ‘Encylopedie VII’ remains coherent
and identifiably reproduced from an original, printed plate, other areas of the
image appear to be in a state of chaotic collapse. ‘Untitled’, 2010 is a work almost measuring 2 by 4 metres and occupies a room to itself, but unlike the
other pieces in the series, this image is taken to the edge of legibility.
Details are so atomised that the original source becomes elusive.

There is a familiar, contemporary technique here of digital imaging
because these fragments are so confidently severed from each other as if Kuitca
had applied ‘desktop’ strategies to manipulate copies. These enlarged and
altered architectural plates, retrieved from history, extend Kuitca’s ongoing
interest in epistemology, which he locates within the impulse to collate
comprehensive information together .

In an adjoining gallery, the artist was exhibiting untitled
paintings that extend the same theme within a contrasting formal style. These
canvases mimic the painterly, analytic brushwork of cubist painting and yet
originate in unidentified maps. Like the scattered architectural plates, these
paintings reconfigure pictorial facts. However, these abstract paintings almost
lose any power of communication except for lines of paint in red and yellow
that may suggest roads or landmarks on a map. The viewer is left with a series
of painterly marks that conflate analytic description with instinctual
expression. Our bearings are lost as we are left with implied information
within images seemingly driven by subjectivity.

Kuitca’s works inspired by the invention of the enclycopaedia
brilliantly opens up a post-modern dialogue around meaning and authority, but
the reconfigured maps are overly conceptual and are left adrift in a deep gap
between invention and quotation so that they feel contrived and inert.

Taking art beyond the studio to the landscape, Nancy Holt’s career
has been linked with the ‘Land Art’ of Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and her
late husband, Robert Smithson. Concerned with temporal interventions in specific
sites, the work has an ambivalent status located outside the traditional,
commodified nature of the art market. At Haunch of Venison, Holt exhibits over
hundred photographs that document such site specific work or thematically link
existing natural or man-made structures.

‘Sunlight In Sun Tunnels’ of 1976 charts the progression of the sun
in the sky as light flows through apertures drilled into the roof of a concrete
tunnel. Like a series of cinematic frames, moving light and shadow within the
tunnels evinces the nature of time determined by nature’s clock, the sun.
Sunlight slips across the hard surface of the concrete skin while the
surrounding landscape remains visibly fixed, framed by the entrance to this
circular sculpture.

An earlier piece, ‘California Sun Signs’ of 1972, photographically
documents marketing cliches on billboards and signs that connect Californian
sunshine with notions of hedonism and health. But this ambition is ironically
subverted by the kitsch designs and tatty condition of these motels and shops,
casting doubt whether the promise of satisfaction can ever be fulfilled.
Arranged as a randomly shaped grid, these images of metaphorical vitality
acquire a pleading quality by selling a climate for cash.

Perhaps, the most successful piece in the show, titled ‘Western
Graveyards’ of 1968 is a composite of 60 prints running alongside two full
walls of one room, documenting westwards migration. These graves have an
improvised quality. Love and respect drive attempts to build places of
remembrance delineated by arrangements of stones, plastic flowers and ribbons.
Often, scripts on wood or stone are eroded, barely legible. Many graves appear
anonymous, abandoned or lost to memory and seem to be returning to dry dust.
There is a pathos to this work, a tribute to the grind of building lives in an
unyielding environment. But ‘Western Graveyards’ also speaks of the almost
futile project to settle the mythic west.

Holt’s career addresses this human impulse to fashion nature whether
on Dartmoor in England or in the American deserts. Where her work is most
beguiling is on the boundary where hope and desire meets the resistance of
environment, site and time.

Employing the model of Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’, Grayson Perry
presents a satirical morality tale of contemporary British life in The ‘Vanity
of Small Differences’, a suite of six tapestries, measuring 200 by 400 in editions
of six each. Designed using computer software, but made on traditional weaving
looms in Spain, they form a remarkable new achievement for an artist affiliated
to methods traditional craftsmanship and social satire as subject. The
exhibition introduces several new pots made in his characteristic overlay of
textural commentary and witty, graffiti-style illustrations, but the stars of
this show are these exuberant and comic observations of British class and
aspiration. These excavations of caste and class are stitched together from
wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk, a deliberate blending of luxury
materials with the synthetic.

The six tapestries illustrate the life and tragic demise of a
brilliant software designer, Tim Rakewell, born into working class life who
uses his talent to build a fortune but whose success leads to a tragically
early death when driving his luxury car too fast on a grimy city street. Perry
returns to the allegorical model of the tapestry because it lends itself even
more so than painting to storytelling, particularly caricature. Weaving cannot
produce the hyper-real illusion of the brushstroke. Instead, the tapestry is an
ideal form for instruction and a cartoon-like summation.

Perry has a deft understanding of Britain’s anxieties about wealth
and status often expressed in feelings of envy, hostility and distrust.
‘Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close’ illustrates the protagonist’s final rupture with the
family home as he moves towards bourgeois life with his middle-class girlfriend.
All of the cultural chasms and subtleties of class distinction are laid bare.
In the penultimate tapestry, Tim, is shown, hunting the upper class,
personified by a stag being torn apart by hounds, which becomes a symbol for
historical cycles of new money overtaking old.

‘The Vanity of Small Differences’ is a formally brilliant rendering
of modern life, in the style of a parable. Perry’s flair for comedy produces an
entertaining romp resembling a theatrical farce while still managing to create
a persuasive critique of contemporary materialism.

About Me

I am a London-based lecturer and writer specialising in Modern and Contemporary art. I teach at Christie's Education, Sotheby's Institute and work freelance at the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. I am also a reviewer for Flash Art magazine.This blog is a place to comment on art and visual culture in London and abroad. I Tweet @Joshuaswhite and Five Senses can be found at http://joshuasimonwhite.blogspot.co.uk

For any publishing projects or media appearances, I can be reached at joshua@joshuaswhite.com. Formerly, I was a founding editor of Metrobeat (now Citysearch), New York, the first listings guide to the city and subsequently the launch producer of the BBC Online homepage.